The term “melting pot” has fallen out of favor as a way of describing the manner in which immigrants from far-flung lands fall into the groove of being American. The accent is now on pluralism—the idea that preexisting identities don’t simply melt away when people move to the States, but rather, that cultures reassert themselves here, threading their own bright colors through the warp and weft of the American tapestry. Distinction is preserved. The trouble with both of these metaphors—which matter a great deal, by the way—is that they’re each insufficient in their depiction of the exchange between assimilation and tribal affiliation. In their Public School show today, Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne were striving to produce a more complex image of the émigré experience—one that acknowledges the ways that cultural identities simultaneously flourish, shift, and reinvent in combination with others in the hothouse environment of multiethnic cities like New York.

This was an ambitious conceit for a collection, as well as a timely one. Which is why, although in some ways it made sense for this show to be as polyglot as it was, it would have been nice for Chow and Osborne to articulate their theme more straightforwardly. There were a lot of ideas passing down the Public School runway. The ones communicated with the most force were those found in the cleanest looks and those that were emphatic about the experiences we all share. The humble plastic bag, for instance, was a source of much inspiration here, from the smiley face logo and shopkeeper mantra “come again” to the bagged bottoms of the Public School short shorts. Frankly, Chow and Osborne could have dedicated more collection real estate to their solid idea of layering colors, palimpsest-style, beneath plastic bag–like translucent nylon—and a good deal less of it to affected (and perplexing) notions such as strapping the hell out of their looks.